This chapter offers a perspective on ten functions of community-level systems, how to identify those which are crucial to community evolution and empowerment, the public policies which will facilitate them, and the actions required to support communities.

INTRODUCTION

1. Young family and youth service functions
2. Continuing community knowledge and learning function
3. Health, fitness and recreation, and rehabilitation function
4. Humanitarian services for troubled and vulnerable people
5. Consumer logistical, mobility and habitat support function
6. Business and industrial support function
7. Corridors, gateways and infrastructure system
8. Energy system
9. Water, forests, parks, open space, and agriculture
10. Security, safety, and emergency management

INTRODUCTION

As communities build the capacities to adjust to globalization and the needs of an increasingly complex future, they will address current functions in the context of future needs. Over the past few years the World Future Society has encouraged the sharing of experiences among its members working with communities. Why communities? For many reasons. Today everything seems to be going global and local at the same time. "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" was an appealing idea when used as a theme a few decades ago. Today it is a necessity for communities. Some argue that "Thinking and Acting Globally and Locally" is more appropriate. Some pioneering communities are doing just that. More will follow.

Throughout the world, national governments are shifting responsibilities to local communities for meeting citizens' needs. Similarly, industries are restructuring to both global and local operations. An executive in the financial industry recently observed that in a few years the industry will look like a barbell with a few very large, global, fully integrated firms at one end, many small community-focused, personal and small business service firms at the other, and no medium sized firms. This is happening in most industries.

Demographic, technological and ecological change drivers and shapers are altering the nature of citizens' needs and relationships and their visions of preferred futures. Communities must develop the capabilities to enable them to act as complex dynamic systems to strengthen the foundations of civil societies and social progress. What are separate "issues" and policies at higher levels, are integrated into the dynamic situations in communities. Thus at the community level, the capacity to support long-term, integrated visioning, planning, development, and learning for social progress, can be directly linked to consequences, and done collaboratively with stakeholders. These capabilities or capacities require development and support from common core functions of communities.

I see three tasks for work on the future of communities. First is to sharpen the agenda for community progress. Second is to seek consensus on a framework for working collaboratively and facilitating dialogues and research. Third is to map a program on the future of communities for conferences and publications for the next few years. Below I outline an approach to defining an action agenda and suggest a framework for assessing progress.

A variety of approaches can be used to establish an agenda for work on the future of communities. I find it useful to focus on the following sets of core functions or systems of communities as the agenda for assessment, dialogues and development of communities conditions and social progress.

The social progress of communities starts with the knowledge and learning system for youth and their families. Early childhood development services, day care, formal education systems, and a variety of youth groups comprise the core youth and young family service system.

In the United States, little support is provided for infants and parents during the first three years, although research is showing that this is a critical period of development. Ad hoc arrangements are made by young families to juggle work and childcare using a variety of private and some employer-provided day care. Most such support is custodial; some is developmental. Education systems provide little preparation for young adults for family functions, especially parenting, even though these are an important social responsibility of citizens. Failure to fully address citizens’ developmental needs in early childhood is a missed opportunity for strengthening the community for the long-term. Failure to address problems of parental abuse and neglect begins a lifetime of trouble and vulnerability for the children in many cases. Communities can do better. A few communities need to be pioneers and invent effective systems. The starting point is to provide the support and facilitation for the communities' young families to invent their own collaborative support systems. The lessons learned and best practices developed from these pioneers can be shared among communities to support social progress more broadly.

The idea of teaching should be transformed into facilitating learning. Today’s formal elementary and secondary school systems are the current foundation for community socialization and knowledge development. Most school systems have evolved as very independent of the other community functions and groups. They have their own independent school boards and teachers are seldom treated as valued community developers and leaders. Only recently have community business people become engaged with school leaders to help shape skill and knowledge development to meet workforce needs. Tomorrow’s system will be more integrated with other community functions. Pioneers will create programs that will foster understanding and respect and develop functional knowledge and skills in:

Today’s focus on school-to-work strategies provides an opportunity to pioneer in creating life preparing youth services and in integrating them with the business systems and other needs of sustainable communities. Internships, exchange programs for teachers and business people, collaborative research programs, and long-term dialogues on common challenges can all strengthen the relationships between communities' education and work institutions.

Youth and family groups and activities are critical vehicles for community cohesion and understanding. Artistic, religious, scientific, cultural, and athletic interests all provide foundations for collaboration across generations, cultures, occupations, and genders. Communities can support these with shared facilities, organizational and financial management support, and public announcements of plans and accomplishments. These activities draw upon the strong American culture of volunteerism which communities must continuously support.

A community is as strong as its collective knowledge and lifelong learning capabilities. In the decades ahead community and organizational knowledge and learning will be a dominant socio-economic factor. A variety of functions can be integrated to create more effective capabilities. For example, community college, adult education, and library facilities and programs can be integrated into open "malls" for learning and sharing experiences. They would be the "places" where people go for learning, information, counseling services, participation in dialogues, and lodging and services for visitors from other countries and communities (hostel systems). Community-focused colleges can provide an effective foundation. Following are factors that need to be considered in shaping communities' continuing learning and knowledge development capabilities.

Advances in biotechnology, increased life spans, greater expectations of health care, and affordability pressures are driving both expansion and integration of the many fields concerned with "wellness" and "fitness" as well as sickness. The maze of private and public service providers, infrastructure, and payers is not a sustainable system. The attempt to restructure the United States system from the national level failed because the public and stakeholders are not ready for a massive change. Communities need to pioneer and share experiences until sets of workable approaches are invented, tested, and generally accepted balancing commercial, community and customer needs. In this process a new public consensus on health care responsibilities, rights and rationing hopefully will emerge. Communities are the "front line" of this process. To repeat, only after communities have demonstrated what is workable will we be able to shape any viable national policies. Linking communities to determine what is workable, and adaptable to local cultural requirements is essential.

Occupational and environmental health will be a critical focus for communities in the decades ahead. As industrial ecology and other management approaches take root, work will be reengineered to do one of two things. Remove the person from the process through robotics so they may not be harmed or reduce hazardous exposures to minimal levels. A healthy and safe workplace and community place will become a public health expectation all around the world due to labor-management cooperation, increased labor standards and adoption of international environmental management systems standards. Communities will use these in shaping the local standards and evaluating local operations. We can also look to many more challenges as we focus on ergonomics, man-machine interfaces, hearing and sensory protection for the aged, human genome indicators for job suitability, immune system protection, reproductive system protection, risk-benefit analysis for occupational risks, and behavioral and psychological factors in the work environment.

A community is only as strong as its capacity to support and "retether" to civic institutions its most troubled and vulnerable people. People fail to become tethered or become untethered from families, employment, health care, and other support groups for a combination of reasons, including physical and learning disabilities, illiteracy, abuse and neglect, and addictions. Most become frustrated and angry and engage in anti-social actions. Programs directed only at providing work skills and employment opportunities are beyond the reach of the most troubled and vulnerable citizens, since they lack the social functioning ability to participate.

Communities have a variety of means for dealing with their most untethered and socially dysfunctional citizens. Social programs attempt to reach them in the community with homeless shelters and clinics. A few decades ago many were institutionalized in asylums for mentally and physically disabled people under the supervision of the health care system. Today, large portions are under the supervision of the criminal justice system, either in prison or jail or on probation or parole. Prison populations today include a high proportion of illiterate, dyslexic, and abused citizens who failed to ever become tethered to families or schools or suffered shocks and abuses later in development and "dropped out." Gangs and drug groups provide "social" tethering, but result in eventual induction into the criminal justice system. Failure to effectively address learning disability and abuse of young children will perpetuate the creation of troubled and vulnerable citizens.

There are no simple solutions and no single institution, such as prisons or asylums, can "solve" the problem. However, they are able to keep "those people" off the community streets. "Rehabilitation" for the dysfunctional and untethered would have to involve completing building "a life" for them as we do for children. This is a challenge communities are unwilling to consider today. Nevertheless, we desperately need a few pioneering communities to invent truly complex dynamic "rehabilitation" systems, for those citizens who lack the ability to use the formal safety net systems.

How consumers manage their logistics is evolving. Traditional "shopping" and "hauling" by individuals is time consuming. Therefore, a wider range of logistics support will evolve and communities need to provide for the full range. Home shopping and delivery for routine supplies will be the preferred method for many people. Large central malls will continue to support the traditional shoppers. However, the demands for knowledgeable personal service in making consumer choices will continue to shape the growing professional consumer logistics services. Neighborhood logistics centers will continue to meet both the immediate needs and specialty needs of the local consumers.

The personal consumer logistics industries—food, clothing, and entertainment—are completing a massive restructuring into (1) a few very large enterprises that provide standard products with a high degree of self-service world wide and (2) local specialty entrepreneurs with community knowledge and involvement who provide knowledge full service.

Personal mobility in affluent communities by private vehicle provides high individual flexibility and convenience at high socio-economic cost. Transition to a greater mix of energy efficient but still high-cost personal vehicles, flexible community "bus" and "taxi" systems, and low-cost fixed-route systems will evolve as population densities, aging and energy costs accelerate. Restructuring of the energy industry lags most other industries largely because artificially low energy costs today make the need for efficient mobility unnecessary to consumers and communities; that will not last.

In the longer term, the pattern of habitat development–housing and all the supporting energy, water, telecommunications, and transportation systems–will likely transform. Today’s pattern of very large single family houses in affluent communities and urban ghetto and older suburban communities for the working poor could continue to be the means for providing habitats in wealthy countries for some time. However, I cannot see how such a pattern can be socio-economically sustainable as several more billion people in the world put pressure on global resources and ecological systems. Entrepreneurial pioneers will develop and deploy affordable and efficient housing systems based on modularity, new materials, and "wiring harness" techniques long used in other industries to the habitat needs of several billion moderate and lower income families around the world.

Communities will need to facilitate the integration of support services for businesses, including local and regional enterprises, franchises and local operations of global and national enterprises, and an array of independent service providers. The components of the function will evolve over the next few decades, including:

Communities, regions and continents have corridors, gateways and infrastructure systems. Today’s system is the product of post-World War II development ideas. However, we now have the technology to create multi-modal corridors with gateway centers with full logistics support. The need for these systems is likely to drive the next generation of infrastructure development and redevelopment.

Continent spanning smart multi-modal corridors such as a possible North American super surface transportation corridor from points in Canada to points in Mexico using the Interstate routes in the United States are feasible. Such a development could be a prototype for similar corridors on other continents and for the redevelopment of the coastal corridors of North America. Similarly, gateway logistics centers are integrating air, sea, and land corridor access and full logistics support systems in places like Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Long Beach, and other cities. Continental development patterns will likely follow the evolution of these mobility systems as they have in earlier eras.

Communities and regions will also evolve local corridors and gateway centers, which will connect with the continental systems. Since land use decisions are made at the community level, much of the "development" debates in the decades ahead will be about providing for corridors and gateways and redesigning the infrastructure to support the new patterns of flows and activities. In the developed regions on the coasts of North America, much redevelopment will be required.

Infrastructure within communities is likely to change also. Electricity, telephony, and cable television industries have all developed independently and each has brought wires and cables to every house, office building, warehouse and factory. All these industries are restructuring and integrating, as are the technologies that support them. In addition, all are becoming two way systems. Homes and business are "broadcasting" over the Internet. Businesses are generating their own electricity for basic needs, buying only for peaks, and selling excess through the grid. Thus we are moving to a separation of producers/consumers and distributors—toward having one local distributor with one bundle of cables connected to each building. Since communities license these businesses and provide easements for all the services, they will be directly involved in these changes also.

Over the next few decades, the mix of energy sources and uses will continuously change as dominance of fossil fuels gives way to a greater mix with hydrogen fuel cells, renewables, hydro, nuclear, and maybe solar satellites. The transition will be more like evolution as has always been. Today most energy is heavily subsidized, since its price does not cover the full cost of replacement of sources for future generations. Over the coming decades global warming, increased population, and increased industrial activity will drive energy demand higher and increase the indirect costs of fossil fuel energy. Hydrogen, nuclear and renewables are likely to increase their proportion of the energy market.

However, significant changes in the ecological impacts of energy use and meeting the energy needs of several billion more people can only be met by (1) a scientific breakthrough which I am too prudent to count on or (2) energy conservation, especially by the redesign of industrial processes and housing and office buildings for maximum energy efficiency. Pioneering work in industrial ecology and building design is already started. Communities can accelerate this work by adopting sustainable community policies and restructuring local standards to require higher levels of energy efficiency. They will need to support the use of alternative energy systems, such as fuel cells.

The ecological infrastructure and resources of communities are receiving increased attention by such initiatives as sustainable communities, ecological security, industrial ecology, and community responses to climate change. These initiatives provide windows of opportunity for pioneers to invent new approaches to fresh water and sewage systems, forest and park systems, and efficient agriculture. Underpinning all of this work is understanding of natural systems and human systems of the community and their interrelationships.

Water is the critical resource. While water is abundant, useable water at the place and time needed is frequently scarce. Several billion more people in the world will continue to drive demand for fresh water and sewage systems. Many major rivers supply communities and form borders between them. Dams control flows across borders. Contaminated water and sewage flows across borders. Thus action is needed to avoid water conflicts. Since most water law is local and water rights are increasing valuable property, communities will be the first arbiters of disputes as well as the "battle fields" of "water wars" in the decades ahead.

As with energy, we need a combination of more effective water control systems, redesign of agricultural and industrial processes, and conservation practices. River basins and aquifers are the regional entities for integrated water and land use management for agriculture, watershed, sewage, parks and forests, fresh water storage, flood control, and control of run off. All of these are subject to local law and operations; communities need broad and long-term strategies to address these water-based policies. However, forests, which are important to regional and global ecology, are mostly under national and state jurisdiction. Thus communities must engage their representatives in the management process also.

Wrongdoing and disasters do happen continuously. Every community’s primary responsibility is to provide security and safe conditions for its citizens. To remain effective, these services must stay ahead of changes in all the other community systems. Early warning and foresight are integral to effective security, safety and emergency management. Strengthening these anticipatory and preventive approaches is a critical focus of pioneering communities. Contributing to secure and safe community conditions and effective early warning and emergency management is every citizen's responsibility. Over reliance on police and emergency response forces diminishes community security and safety. In addition, many economic and ecological threats are not the focus of traditional community law enforcement and emergency services. Community policing begins greater outreach from police to citizens. But we need to engage the citizens in policing and emergency management. In my opinion, we need to engage citizens in their professional positions—managers, doctors, accountants, teachers, co-workers, friends, bartenders—to take responsibility for strengthening the anticipatory, preventive, and early warning functions with police and emergency management professionals as facilitators and evaluators. Most crises have causes that were evident long before the crisis. A sense of community responsibility needs to be created that makes it "OK" to intervene early.

Communities can also mitigate future damage from recurring incidents, such as flooding and other natural disasters, by permanently relocating people away from the cites of recurring damage and by working with insurers and citizens groups to develop effective preventive measures.

A framework for effective dialogue and research needs to be based on a realistic view of social progress and a general model of social relationships. At the turn of the millennium the world is in a turning point marked by both completion and denouement of a wide range of international agreements, boomtown behavior in rapidly developing countries, reshaping the scope of security, diffusion of information technologies, adoption of more integrated approaches to global systems change, and redistribution of responsibilities from national to local and global institutions. The next decade will be dominated by implementing changes and reshaping international and community relationships to more effectively perform under the emerging rules of the "next system"—international standards, financial discipline, protection of rights, large-scale institutional or systems integration, changing nature of work, strengthening of communities' capabilities, and more. At the same time a few communities, enterprises, and groups are pioneering beyond these new rules to shape the types of communities and capabilities that will become the "system after next."

Social progress is our shared objective. We use a host of competing ideas about community change including growth, development, sustainability, quality of life, and many more. Through our governance processes we continuously reshape our visions of preferred futures, strategies for actions, codes of conduct, and standards for assessing progress. These include community councils and boards, provincial and national governments, and international treaty-based institutions.

We use the idea of social progress in many ways, but we are just beginning to focus on its operational definition and assessment methods. Underlying the notion of social progress is meeting human needs (Maslow’s hierarchy comes to mind). Communities focus on the quality of life of local people and enterprises. They make land use decisions; create and operate or oversee local public services for education, public safety and health, business support, and more; and raise the revenues to support them. Assessment of progress and performance are quite direct and personal since stakeholders are able to engage in the decisions directly. In addition, communities are developing advanced condition and performance assessment methods.

Nationally and internationally, we use the rule of law and governance processes to articulate our goals, codes of conduct, and standards of assessment. For example, in international social and economic human rights treaties we use the idea of "progressive realization." Through the continuing work of international treaty monitoring organizations and nongovernmental organizations assessing local conditions against the treaty standards, we are beginning to evolve more generally accepted understanding of progress from a human rights perspective.

Similarly, the 1995 United Nations conference on social development adopted a declaration and plan of action to eradicate poverty, promote full employment, and foster stable, safe, and just societies. We recognize that this future social progress (or regress) cannot be divorced from the challenges of demographic change, environmental limitations, and technological innovation. We also recognize that reaching social goals requires accurate assessment of current and future challenges to progress as well as appropriate policies to deal with them. Therefore, collaborative work by international researchers and policy makers is focusing on creating assessment approaches and methods.

The chart and description, developed by Dennis Pirages and I for the work of The Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda, outline a framework for examining dynamic interactions among major change drivers, values and institutions. It can also serve as a foundation for community dialogues about its future. Shared moral codes define how the good individual and organizational citizen ought to pursue a virtuous life and shape the criteria they use in making choices. Institutions represent templates for replicating what people have come to consider good behavior and appropriate ways of working together. The major change drivers and shapers are technological diffusion, demographic shifts, and environmental and resource constraints.

In the next few decades, the world will continue to experience rapid population growth in the least developed regions, driving the need to create jobs, housing, food and services for about 2 billion more people. At the same time the developed regions will be adapting to population stabilization and aging. World and local health will continue to be a dominant concern as the threat of rapid spread of diseases and the demand for services as a right drives the health care system and public health policies. These forces are driving communities. Reaching population stability in developed communities means the end of development, as we have known it. Providing jobs and services for rapidly increasing populations in developing communities while adapting to environmental and resource constraints and globalization will require development strategies far more rigorous than that used by the developed countries in their "industrialization." The creation of new forms of community development and concepts of progress will be the challenge. Wellness, fitness and health care will continue to be a rapidly changing socioeconomic sector with technology drivers, with longer- living people demanding services, and all people increasingly concerned with health security—protection from diseases and occupational and environmental risks.

Climate change; energy reserves, production and consumption; world food demand and supply; world and local water supplies; and new resource prospects, such as oceans, space, recycling and resource substitution, are all important forces globally, regionally and locally. The unavoidable constraints of environment and resource limits drive institutions toward sustainable development approaches and methods, including ecological security, industrial ecology, consideration of ecological risk in financial decisions, and environmental human rights.

Biological, digital, materials and nano sciences are all producing knowledge that is leading to the development of new technologies. Innovations in transportation, telecommunications, computers, and biomedicine, among others, are having significant impacts on global and local systems and human progress. They are driving the agendas for institutional change also.

Organizations and patterns of relationships are being impacted by the change drivers and are adapting. A few institutions are pioneering. Significant patterns of change include:

These interrelated factors will dominate institutional change in communities over the next few decades also.

Each generation and culture has a common value system. Our communities now include four generations; each rooted in different 20th Century experiences. The acceleration of the pace of change and aging will extend this range and further diversify the experiential base of "community values." With what groups people identify and from where they internalize their world and community views are also significant factors. Ethnic and religious identities continue to be significant factors. Secular systems of values, including business codes of conduct, human rights, ethics, and community rules, are all being expanded and updated to reflect the institutional realities of today. In a decade or so, another round of reconsideration and updating will be needed after we know more about the "next system" and have some experience from pioneering work on the "system after next."

I have outlined an approach to defining an action agenda on the future of communities and have suggested a framework for assessing progress. I look forward to participating in these activities in the years ahead.

Mr. Hunter is a senior associate of The Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda and the Institute for Global Chinese Affairs of the University of Maryland and Vice President for Professional Programs of the World Future Society.